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      3

      The Problem of Sex

      Forgotten ‘free lovers’ dreamed up many of the assumptions eventually destined for 1920s modernity. In the late nineteenth century, high-minded clusters of free lovers were bringing individualist ideas of the inviolability of the person to their conceptions of personal relations; Lillian Harman insisted in Lucifer in 1897 that ownership of oneself was integral to women’s inner ‘self-respect’.¹ Placing a great emphasis on ‘self-control’, free lovers also believed that a frank and rational approach to love would prevent much unnecessary suffering, and enable people to understand and control their feelings. Sarah Holmes, who became one of Helena Born’s friends in Boston, was, like Born, associated with Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty. Writing under the pseudonym ‘Zelm’, she insisted in 1889 that ‘Honesty is the best policy in love, because it is the only policy that ever gets love – love being the sympathy of those who can understand our real selves.’² Unlike the twentieth-century moderns, however, free lovers did not seek out unconscious motivations. Instead they took as their mentor the Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose novel What Is to Be Done (1863) adopted a highly rationalist stance toward alternative ways of living and loving.

      In their campaigns for honesty, frankness and the right to knowledge, free lovers were confronted by a resolute foe. The campaigner for social purity Anthony Comstock had managed to get a law passed in 1873, banning the distribution of ‘obscene’ literature through the mail. The ‘Comstock Law’ meant that free-love advocates could be criminalized; the editor of Lucifer, Moses Harman, Lillian’s father, went to jail several times for defending women’s sexual freedom, including the right to resist rape in marriage. As late as 1905 Moses Harman was back in prison, for publishing articles by the birth controller Dora Forster on ‘Sex Radicalism’. Forster argued that the worst kind of prostitution occurred in conventional marriages in which women were taught to use their bodies for economic and social advantage. She asserted that few married women experienced sensual enjoyment, and maintained that sex should not be restricted necessarily to one partner. She also defended sexual play in childhood, and advocated sex education.³

      Women free lovers wanted to democratize personal relationships and extend possibilities of choice and control. When in 1898 Lillian Harman came to speak in London to the British free lovers in the Legitimation League, she put the case not simply for ‘freedom in sexual relationships’ but for extending the spaces for wider forms of personal encounter between men and women. She considered that the tendency for women’s ‘expression of friendship’ to ‘be construed into an invitation to flirtation’ distorted relations between the sexes. She wanted women to be able to define whether relationships were to be sexual or not, rather than simply having to respond to the terms set by men. Women’s freedom was one aspect of a wider ‘freedom in social relationships’.⁴

      The women free lovers’ campaigns for the right to knowledge involved not simply access to information but self-knowledge, an inner awareness which could foster empathy with others. Writing in Liberty in 1888, Sarah Holmes connected self-control to ‘self-understanding’. Replying to a worried young anarchist whose girlfriend Minnie had been shocked by his views on free love, Holmes explained to him how Chernyshevsky had demonstrated that a troubled love was not real love. We could not rely on our ‘natural, spontaneous feeling’, because ‘We are taught the traditions of slavery’. Constant struggle and ‘watchfulness’ were needed ‘against lapses and mistakes’. In believing he loved Minnie ‘instead of some woman who was a theoretical free lover’ he was, she suggested, emotionally ambiguous about his own free-love ideas. She then proceeded to propound to him the alternative Holmes ideal of ‘free love’. Love was part of a process of harmonized development through which a person grew ‘wholly . . . not unevenly’, and it required ‘latent sympathy in ideas’. She thought that love became ‘a quiet, gentle, normal, life-giving impulse and power only as fast and as far as this sympathy is found and its free expression made possible. It becomes a troubled, wild, anxious, life-destroying fever and madness as fast and as far as this sympathy is lost sight of, or jarred upon, or intercepted in its manifestation.’⁵

      Similarly idealistic, perfectionist aspirations to wholeness, harmony and control recur in the writings of other free-love women. Elmina Slenker proposed ‘Dianaism’, a non-penetrative sexuality advocated by Tolstoy, as a means of gaining wisdom and poise. In December 1889, she assured readers of Ezra Heywood’s Word that this was not a ‘cold, apathetic, distant, unnatural Love’ designed to deny sex feeling.⁶ Eight years later in Lucifer, Slenker – who believed as did many feminists in this period that women were more spiritual than men – was still explaining Dianaism: ‘The little touches, pats and caresses tokens of love. The clasp of the hand, the glance of affection, the tone of the voice, and all that speaks of genuine kindliness and friendliness; this we offer in place of the overmuch sexing, that is murdering millions of wives and scattering syphilis all over the world.’⁷ Accepting that ‘the masses’ would move slowly towards Dianaism, she suggested that meanwhile small groups could set an example by adopting alternative ways of making love. Drawing on a metaphor of thrift, common in nineteenth-century free-love discourse, Slenker advised readers of Lucifer that they should ‘Conserve the life forces and not needlessly waste them in mere paroxysms of pleasure’.⁸ Other women in free-love circles were also interested in changing sexual practices. Alice B. Stockham, a friend of Lillian Harman, argued in Karezza: Ethics of Marriage (1896) that copulation should not be regarded as simply a means for procreation; rather it should be ‘a blending of body, soul and spirit’.⁹ Prolonged intercourse without orgasm for either men or women, Stockham maintained, was both pleasurable and a form of soul union.

      However, women’s supposed spirituality proved contentious. While some women free lovers agreed with Slenker that the ‘sex instinct’ was stronger in men, others angrily asserted women’s physical desires. In 1897 Dora Forster told a London meeting of radical sexual reformers at the Legitimation

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